A word from the Editor: Albert Einstein once said: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.” In a day and age where the American Institute of Medicine estimates people 98,000 are killed per year in Medical accidents, making it the 6th biggest killer and costing the U.S more than $29 billion. Can we really trust scientists to be conducting experiments with the capacity to create a black hole under the surface or our planet?
Steak:
Now I don’t know about all you but men (or women) in lab coats scare the crap outta me, It’s not only that their numerous years of class room education leave them with little to no people skills, but also since on infallibility that often has fatal and often unknown repercussions.
The famous biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, has argued that “scientists can delude themselves” and even the great Einstein was known to get it wrong, he was even heard to have said “There is not the slightest indication that energy will ever be obtainable from the atom,” Take Scientist John Darsee for example who in 1981 faked over 100 research papers on heart disease or the Chernobyl Debacle which killed 4,300 people and wounded or disabled 70,000 more, and whose effects are still being seen in parts of the north, like Canada and Siberia. All you have to do is look at numbers. Doctors today are over prescribing antibiotics, and pharmaceutical companies are compelling doctors to push there latest “miracle drug” like common street pushers, and we all know what consequences that can have, just look at Fen-Phen and Thalidomide. And the Grand Puba Y2K, everyone remembers the panic everyone was in around December 1999. Well it cost about $100 billion, to “fix” the problem. And when the clocks rolled over, what’s happened, a big NUTHING. Another example of fear posturing and how we sheep fell right in line. Do we need another challenger before we realize that a lab coat doesn’t give you the mandate to play puppeteer with real people?
Now Approximately a year ago the European Organization for Nuclear Research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN ) or CERN, built a giant particle accelerator, with the purpose of smashing particles together at close to light speed velocities in order to observe a particle called a Higgs boson a key to understanding the “Big Bang” or whatever mysteries origin our universe has. Sounds fun enough right?, well the only drawback it that it may create black holes that scientists HOPE will dissolve into what they call Hawking Radiation and say that something going wrong is “nearly impossible”. When the consequences of your actions are the destruction of our planet, as far as I’m concerned, nearly is not good enough.
On the 19th of September 2008, the operations were halted due to a serious fault with the LHC. Well at least they were able to catch it before it killed us all, and they plan to kick it back into gear mid-November 2009, I know this scares the crap outta me. Everyone understands that certain sacrifices need to be made in the name of progress, and as the old saying goes, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, but if you break the whole carton of eggs, that’s all she wrote, no do over’s. GAME OVER.
Eggs:
History is littered with people who have laid down their lives in the name of science, brave souls who understand that’s without sacrifice nothing can be achieved, and mankind may have nothing to aspire to. One example that comes to mind is the Challenger Accident. Those seven men and women lost their lives not in vain, but so that future generations would understand the dangers or space travel, and so that no one else would suffer the same fate, unfortunately seven others were killed in the Columbia disaster. But the sacrifices that they made have moved the progress of mankind a head leaps and bounds.
Take for example Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov. He was a Russian “Renaissance Man” who pioneered the blood transfusion procedure, and preformed it successfully more than 11 times on himself and once on V.I Lenin’s sister, and died in 1928 after complication arose from a transfusion (took blood from a person with TB). How many people have been saved by a blood transfusion? Or William Bullock who invented the rotary printing press among other things. He kicked a drive belt in order to get it working and got his leg stuck in the machine, later died from complications during the amputation. But one of the most significant and little known people claimed by there own inventions was Otto Lilienthal known as the “Glider King”. He was the first person to make successful gliding flights more than once. After years of successful flights, I guess fate caught up with him and on n August 9, 1896, he fell from a height of 56 feet and broke his spine. He died the next day, but said “Kleine Opfer müssen gebracht werden!” (”Small sacrifices must be made!”). The Wright Brothers credited him with as their inspiration for pursuing flight. “Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century,” Wilbur Wright said, “Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important.”
Without people willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the advancement of our species, we’d still be stuck in the dark ages, drilling holes in peoples skulls to release demons and letting blood for everything from head aches to the common cold. I believe it was the great Mr. Spock who put it best saying, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” We should never take for granted the sacrifices these people have made, nor should we forget them.
Steak and Eggs 